Modern Automation with VMware Cloud Foundation Part 1: Push-Button Infrastructure Provisioning

The Challenge of DIY Automation: “The Frankenstein Approach” Leveraging VCF to Automate This Process What Does an SDDC Look Like? Real-World Examples of VCF Infrastructure Automation Stay Tuned for Part 2: Leveraging the VCF API for Infrastructure Automation Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles Modernizing EDA Infrastructure: Lessons from Samsung’s VCF Deployment How to Converge a VMware vSphere Environment to VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 VCF Breakroom Chats Episode 83 – Designing Developer-Loved Platforms: What is an IDP? In a former life, I successfully automated ESX rollouts, livestock-style in what we’d call a “vSphere only” environment. The project was to automate the process of ESX bare-metal host provisioning: storage zoning, bare metal installation, ESX configuration, vCenter import, post-vCenter configuration, iPAM/CMDB and monitoring registration, and so on. Upon project completion, we could provision an ESX host into any cluster in 18 minutes, and ESX host decommission and re-provision took 30 minutes. It was a powerful ESX-host-as-livestock approach: No need to do upgrades; every major update/upgrade was a new installation. No need to troubleshoot. Just roll out a new ESX host and decom the faulty one so you can troubleshoot it risk-free or delegate it to others, limiting the need for lengthy on-call events. Capacity planning became more flexible because we could pull any host from any lesser-utilized cluster and, within minutes, place it into a higher-utilized cluster. This saved tens of thousands of dollars every quarter since we didn’t have to plan for peak utilization. The project took months of iteration and no less than five platforms to get it all up and running. Why did it take so long, and why was it so complex? Because I had to learn and debug all five different platforms to get it all working; I had to make sure all five platforms worked together through my infrastructure pipeline. This is what we might call DIY automation; outside of REST APIs, I wasn’t really given an easy way to automate anything. I was mostly on my own.